Lords Spiritual (Women) Bill

Bob Russell Excerpts

Monday 19th January 2015 Commons Chamber

[The Parliamentary Secretary, Cabinet Office (Mr Sam Gyimah)]

I beg to move, That the Bill be now read a Second time.

The Bill has been brought forward by the Government in response to the welcome decision by the Church of England to allow the ordination of female bishops. It will ensure that female diocesan bishops can join their male counterparts on the Lords Spiritual Benches sooner than they would have done under the current rules.

Bishops have attended Parliament from its earliest beginnings. In the first Parliaments, abbots as well as bishops and archbishops attended as Lords Spiritual alongside the nobles and peers of the realm—the Lords Temporal. Several Archbishops of Canterbury served mediaeval kings as Lord Chancellor. After the Reformation, abbots ceased to be Lords Spiritual. In the reformed Church of England, there were 26 diocesan bishops, all of whom had the right to sit as Lords Spiritual.

[Sir Bob Russell (Colchester) (LD)]

I am sorry to bring a note of discord to the proceedings, but I am bound to observe that the whole arrangement is for one denomination of the Christian Church. If we are to have religious people in the other place in the 21st century, surely they should be more representative of all Christian denominations and, indeed, should reflect all faiths.

[Mr Gyimah]

The Bill is very focused. It does not seek to change the composition or powers of the House of Lords, but to allow something that will happen anyway—the admission of female bishops to the House of Lords—to happen sooner than it otherwise would.

--- Later in debate ---

[Sir Bob Russell (Colchester) (LD)]

Thank God for women priests, because the Anglican Church would be in dire trouble in many parts of the country if there were no ordained women. I pay tribute to the women priests of the Church of England in my constituency over the past 30 years.

I speak as somebody who is not an Anglican. I come from good non-conformist stock, brought up in the Congregational Church and now in the United Reformed Church. My great-grandfather was a Congregational minister, one grandfather was a lay preacher, and my parents were leading members of their churches. As Members can gather, that has obviously become diluted through the generations. I am intrigued by the lords a-leaping—the bishops’ gymnastics—that we have heard about, and I have a wonderful picture as to how that will be carried out.

The Bill is great news and I shall support it, even though I am not an Anglican. As I said earlier, of all the Christian denominations—clearly, I am a Christian—only one denomination is guaranteed 26 places in the other place, although my right hon. Friend the Member for Berwick-upon-Tweed (Sir Alan Beith) has briefed me that a female Methodist priest has been in the other place for many years, so it is good to see them catching up. The Christian Church is stronger as a result of having different denominations with people of all views, whether they be evangelical, high church, non-conformist or Salvation Army, and so on. There is a breadth of denominations, yet only one denomination has guaranteed places in the other place.

I did my bit to break the mould in 1986-87, when I became mayor of Colchester and appointed the first woman ever to be the mayor’s chaplain—Deaconess Christine Shillaker. I had the great privilege and honour of being in Saffron Walden when she became a “Rev”—although still not a full “Rev”—and then of being in Chelmsford cathedral when she was in the first cohort of women in Essex to become fully fledged clergy who were able to do everything, and not just have the pick-and-mix approach that the Anglican Church allowed them at different times.

Regarding that very important occasion, what also sticks in the memory is that some of the people there were opposed to women being ordained; I am not sure what they would do about them becoming bishops. There was—only British culture could allow for this—a formal protest. At the end of the penultimate verse of the last hymn, the whole proceedings stopped to enable a reverend gentleman, Rev. Bell from Stanway near Colchester, to go forward and explain why it was wrong to allow women to become priests. A bewigged gentleman from the diocese office then went forward and explained why it was legally okay to proceed. To Rev. Bell’s credit, as he walked the full length of Chelmsford cathedral, the packed congregation sang the last verse with even greater gusto. I am delighted to say that the Rev. Christine Shillaker later had her own parish near Harwich, where she did her time, and she is now happily retired, living back in Colchester. I am so pleased that it fell to me to invite a woman to be the mayor’s chaplain and thus break the mould.

It is obviously an historical outrage that there is not a diocese of Colchester. We are in the diocese of Chelmsford, and have been for a hundred years, and I had hoped that the Archbishop of Canterbury would have stayed just long enough to hear this plea. Kent has two Anglican cathedrals, so why, given its population growth, cannot Essex? The plea is stronger, coming as it does from a non-Anglican. The historical support for such a plea is that Colchester was once the capital of Roman Britain, and in my town, visible to this day, are the remains of arguably the oldest Christian church in the British Isles. It was a Christian church in the closing period of the Roman occupation. It has taken the Christian Church centuries to get this far, and the Anglicans are catching up on many of the non-conformist Churches. Today, Parliament can say yes to women bishops in the other place, but Anglicans are not the only Christian denomination in this country, and if the Anglican Church is represented in the House of Lords, the other denominations should be too.